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HYMN & CAROL Snack Stix Productions Christmas shows tend to be too solemn, too sentimental, or both. Then there are Hymn & Carol and Christmas With Elvis, which aim for the ridiculous. Both go too far. The most effective parts of Hymn & Carol are the most solemn–the ridiculous interludes merely interrupt the sublime Christmas songs. And Christmas With Elvis would benefit from a generous dose of sentimentality: here the characters merely exchange quips and gross out the audience....

The term “jazz diva” gets tossed around fairly indiscriminately; it’s been used to describe just about every improvising vocalist at one time or another. But thanks to her coloratura technique–replete with a startling dramaticism, flawless intonation, and a vibrato that can get as wide as the Mississippi–Morgana King may actually deserve the honorific. Disagreement might come more readily from the jazz camp than from the opera lovers. King’s bell-like soprano produces notes of an ethereal purity, like the supernatural tones you get by rubbing the rim of a glass; to get them, King makes frequent use of her “head voice,” a technique taught classical singers for the relaxed manipulation of the highest registers....

To the editors: [Re: “Life Without Father,” October 9] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I saw a photo of several women, each with a smile pasted on her face, and almost all of them holding their bastard offspring; then I read page after page of a sickening article about women who deliberately make their children bastards, and not once did the author call a spade a spade....

Officer Jack came to my door in street clothes–a tall, friendly, good old Irish cop with a strong handshake. He sat on the couch and took everything down on a yellow pad. Soon I was talking live with the voice on the tape. She asked me if I’d applied for a credit card recently. I laughed. I haven’t applied for a credit card since Jimmy Carter added a credit-card surcharge in a desperate attempt to make it look like he was doing something to fight inflation....

7/28/87–I was sitting at Judy’s house with the women’s group tonight. Judy said she is not going to make a decision about her career change this month. Her astrologer advised against it. Her sun was conjunct Neptune; Mercury was in retrograde. Berger told me she sees images and hears voices, that she’s been deemed clairaudient and clairvoyant. She said she was going to read the images in my aura. Apparently, there are people in my aura who talk to her....

What does a mayor elected by the people of Chicago have in common with a mayor chosen by the city’s 50 aldermen? Invitations. According to the man who has had the job of telling both mayors where to go, Eugene Sawyer gets as many invitations as Harold Washington ever did. How a mayor arrives in office is not an issue. Personality and policies don’t matter. It’s the office itself that accounts for offers to attend more events than the world’s most ambitious hand shaker could possibly accept....

For a while there, Jerry Roman almost thought she’d have to walk home from Schaumburg every day. Her employer’s van service, which provided transportation from her job in the suburbs to her home on the near west side, was being discontinued because of liability-insurance problems. She and the six other van riders would have to find some other alternative. Driving herself was out of the question because Roman has night blindness and can’t drive after dark....

You might call it Virtual Funk. It’s the process whereby “feel” and “groove” in modern pop music have been progressively diverted from actual human performers and inserted into microcircuits. Contemporary dance music of all kinds–rap and hip hop, soul, pop, and hard rock–all now benefit from the triumph of the machine. If it seems paradoxical to you that music software programs now carry a “humanize” function, you are living in the past....

A CHRISTMAS CAROL Charles Dickens’s Christmas classic A Christmas Carol has become more ubiquitous than the story of the Nativity. For many, Christians and non-, the Dickens tale defines whatever goodness Christmas still yields–and more effectively than the gospels’ static tableaux of awestruck shepherds, tribute-laden kings, and hyperactive angels. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Interestingly, A Christmas Carol borrows from another sacred myth besides Christmas....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Tim doesn’t have the avuncular nature that Harold had, plus, he had come in with the machine. Over several months time, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Evans’s concerns were my concerns: recycling as a solution to the city’s garbage problem, better schools (and a sound plan to achieve true reform), improved public health via better education, and a plan for economic development that favors real workers, not developers....

Friday 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » White Sox fans might want to check in at the first annual Soxfest at the Hyatt Regency, 151 E. Wacker. The weekend-long affair will introduce new manager Gene Lamont at a ribbon-cutting ceremony, which immediately follows the singing of the national anthem tonight at 5:25. Things run till 9 tonight, from 11 to 7 tomorrow, and from 10 to 3 Sunday, with pitching cages, dunk tanks, seminars with managers and broadcasters, an autograph session with players (no charge!...

A fascinating 45-minute video documentary by Chicagoan Bob Hercules, filmed on location with a crew of four, that concentrates largely on the U.S. media coverage of the Nicaraguan elections. What emerges is not only a sharp piece of alternative news coverage that helps to explain the outcome (a matter that most mainstream coverage tended to obfuscate) and an informative account of the various powers at play, but also a revealing and multifaceted (and alternately funny and chilling) look at how the U....

Birding, like football, is a sport played in all weathers. Birders pursue their sightings through rain, snow, agonizing windchills, and wilting heat. Field-trip schedules usually carry the simple warning: dress for the weather. The main streets were wet but not slippery, which was good, because our territory was along the Des Plaines River between Dundee Road and Lake Cook Road, and going that far at a safe speed on the skating rinks around my house would have taken until next Tuesday....

Some of the experiences 35-year-old actor-playwright Kevin Ming shares in the “home” section of his charming and funny memory piece Home and Away are a little odd: the Boy Scout taxidermy display that backfired, for instance, or his attempted escape from the hospital for “kids with missing pieces” where Ming was sent as a child to have his stunted left arm treated. But most of his stories are recollections of growing up like thousands of other boys in heavily Lutheran Minnesota–fighting with his brother in the backseat of the family car, passing out in church after seeing how long he could hold his breath during the sermon, experimenting with drugs as a teenager, imagining the mysteries of Catholicism (he thought catechism must be a cross between catacombs and hypnotism), or confronting his parents’ divorce....

Lead Story Recently in Alberta, Canada, Minister of Culture Doug Main downplayed concern about the province’s first ever admissions fees to museums and historic sites introduced in April. Main said that before the fees were imposed, he’d heard that many Albertans were saying, “Golly, these are wonderful facilities. How come you’re not charging?” He explained, “What we want to do is make sure that all those thousands, tens of thousands of people who [come to a museum] and reach into their pocket ready to put down 10 or 15 or 20 bucks for the family, have the opportunity to do that....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I have read all three of the major papers’ reviews of the recent Pet Shop Boys concert and, although yours came closest to the mark, have found them all, to varying degrees, inadequate. The one huge omission that all three reviewers make is that they never mention the two words which most accurately describe what the Pet Shop Boys and their shows are all about: “gay” and “camp....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’d like to thank you for your fine article on Environmental Illness and candida [“The Yeast of Our Problems,” January 22]. Let me note a few things that were not mentioned in the piece. For many of us with this form of severe, chronic illness, there is not an obvious distinction among Environmental Illness, candida, and Chronic Epstein-Barr Virus as valid diagnoses to describe the symptoms of our condition....

The bat’s too heavy. It’s a thick-handled #5 Mickey Mantle rather than my lean #4 Johnny Bench, which I must have split the week before, and its leaden weight deadens my muscles, aggravates the soreness of my joints. Following a few clumsy swings, I drape the bat over my shoulders like a yoke and approach the plate, eyes on the turf. Gripping the bat at the base of the handle, I’m unable to control its balance, the tip falling to the ground with a thud....

Did black Africans trade in slaves? My recollection from high school history class is that the local dealers who sold the slaves to Europeans were mostly Arabs. But lately I’ve been hearing that the Africans themselves sold each other into slavery. This not being the most politically correct topic in the world, I trust only you to give me the Straight Dope. –Name withheld, New York Best of Chicago voting is live now....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In the case of the Grant Park orchestra, where each program gets two rehearsals and conductors are around for a few days at most, their impact is minimal. In their rehearsal time of four hours and ten minutes, they can usually run through the program a couple of times, and perhaps make a few comments or work out a tricky spot or two....